Big Data Bits: We're Hooking-Up, But That's Not All

Does an alliance or partnership between two tech companies have as much impact as a new software release? We wonder if anyone has ever done the calculations. If so, please share.

As for us, we’ve taken our valuation hats off for the day to report on the big data and analytics news, which is all about (surprise!) new alliances, new capabilities and new releases.

Elasticsearch Offers Hadoop Connector, Cloudera Certification

If you haven’t yet heard of Elasticsearch yet, listen up. This company is getting big, fast.

If you already know Elasticsearch, we don’t have to vie for your attention because who can ignore a startup that has raised $104 million from investors and scored more than 8 million downloads in less than two years.

For those not familiar with the Elasticsearch, it’s the search and analytics engine behind the ELK stack (The E stands for Elasticsearch, the “L” Logstash, an open source log management tool and the “K” for open source Kibana which provides visualizations of logs and time-stamped data).

What it does, in plain English, is to provide a way for business that offer digital products - whether through websites or mobile apps –to make sense of the data associated with them.

This includes data generated by website activity and product interactions. For example:

“If they (customers) are able to access this data and analyze it using statistical math calculations, they have the ability to gain better insights into their customers and products, helping run their business more effectively,” explained Amy White, Director of Global Marketing, at Elasticsearch.

Elasticsearch’s magic is that it not only makes it easy to search massive amounts of data, but it comes with mathematical equations built into it, so businesses can easily analyze their data and draw insights.

Yesterday, Elasticsearch announced the 2.0 release of its Hadoop connector,Elasticsearch for Apache Hadoop. It indexes data as it’s being generated, making it available for search and analysis in a matter of seconds versus hours.Kibana can then be used to easily explore the massive amounts of data through easy to generate pie charts, bar graphs, scatter plots, histograms and more.

Elasticsearch also announced that it has now been certified for Cloudera Enterprise. It was already on board with Hortonworks and MapR.

Thoughtspot Bags Big Bucks

Searching through analytical data is challenging, unless you’re using Thoughtspot, that is. And while that may not yet be true at the moment, the startup hopes you’ll be saying that soon.

Started by engineers from Google, Yahoo and Nutanix, the company’s aim is to democratize access to analytical data throughout the Enterprise, thereby making BI as easy as searching Google.

For the moment the capability is available via an appliance (hardware plus software) that connects to the Enterprise’s Infrastructure and Hadoop. It leverages its own in-memory database and computational tools. It searches for numbers instead of documents.

The company’s first round of funding was oversubscribed. Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie participated in this round.

An interesting, but insignificant side note, regarding Levie’s participation, is that Levie is a cloud evangelist and Thoughtspot is not about the cloud (yet). Maybe he’s finally admitting that some Enterprise information will stay on prem for a bit.

Tableau’s Brings Tableau to Macs

Tableau helps Enterprises and individuals visualize their data in beautiful and interesting ways. Their World Cup data viz has been popular on CMSWire this month.

Earlier this week, the red hot company (even on Wall Street) announced Tableau 8.2 which was built from the ground up for Mac and provides tools for interactive storytelling and a new, compelling maps interface that was designed in partnership with Stamen.

MongoDB and Teradata Hook-Up

Yesterday MongoDB and Teradata announced that, together, they have built a connector to allow users to easily connect MongoDB applications with analytics running on Teradata. The seamless, self-service access to data and analytic processing is made possible via Teradata QueryGrid which brings analytics to the data vs. the other way around.

This is made possible via Teradata’s QueryGrid which leverages JSON to put logic to structured, unstructured or semi-structured data, whether it comes from the Internet of Things (IoT) or an enterprise resource planning system. Now MongoDB users will have the ability to access JSON that has been enriched by Teradata to support applications for mobile, Internet of Things, eCommerce and social media, according to the companies.

Accenture Allies with Cloudera

It’s likely that we’ll be hearing more and more about Cloudera hook-ups in the days, weeks and months to come and that’s because its Enterprise Data Hub strategy is starting to stick.

Today Accenture announced an alliance with the $1 billion funded Hadoop startup. The companies will work together to help enterprises leverage big data and analytics by offering them big data expertise, Hadoop training and data acceleration capabilities for real-time decision-making and a return on analytics investments.

What’s the win for Cloudera? Access to Accenture’s knowledge and C-Suite connections.

Accenture will benefit from Cloudera’s Hadoop expertise including support, training and experience in helping companies deal with things like data acceleration.

Alteryx Lets You Read, Write Hadoop Data

At Alteryx’s user conference, Inspire 2014, the company announced that analysts will soon be able to read data directly from the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), blend it with other sources, perform advanced analytics and then write enriched data back to HDFS with Alteryx Analytics.

The capability will be announced in the next release of Alteryx and we’ll let you know more about it at that time.

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